Stillborn
by sedemihcrA
Summary: If poems are but epitaphs, stories are their grief. And God collects these little sounds, listening in our sleep. Mothers lose their children so, and rightly do they weep. Evil thus is all we know, fulfilling our relief.
1. The Dry Salvages

**Quick Notes:** This story has a lot of allusions in it, none of which you must know to enjoy it. The "darktext" is taken mostly from T.S. Elliot. Throughout there is some Faulkner, some of the manga "Berserk," even a little of NIN's new Album "Year Zero," and probably others I've forgotten. The quotes from Elliot can be found in "The Wasteland" and "The Four Quartets."

Also, a thank you to my prereader, Fresh C. He's pretty well-writ in Eva himself so check his stuff out too.

* * *

**1. The Dry Salvages**

He remembered slipping. Like a nightmare where you wake up falling. Without the wake up part. Slipping, down, deeper, into the maw of it. Enemy.

Now just alone, floating in infinity spread blank and boring. Pointless. _What a pointless way to die,_ he thought. As an Eva pilot he'd often imagined his own death. It was supposed to be a grand, climactic thing. _Spectacle_.

Heaps of blood and venom, oozing from his open wounds. He and the Angel grappling, locked in each other's death embrace. Pain unlike the quality and texture any other human could ever know, soaring through his torn appendages, igniting his maimed body. It seemed like the right way to die. Sound and fury. Not whimpering silence. Not this. Anything but this.

The descent eternal, meaningless in infinity, had transposed itself into his consciousness and found new passage there. Rather than sink into the void, the motion carried on within him—the void sank into him! Dredging out that which lies beneath. Where the dark things lived and swelled. The things Shinji Ikari could believe he never possessed if not for—

The voice spoke through a boiling furnace of metallurgy, booming certainty and the wretched tinny scraping of rust on rust, empty of any human inflection, a grating staccato of syllables wrenched and upended then flattened and exploded, total and sudden:

_** SON OF MAN,**_

_**YOU CANNOT SAY, OR GUESS, for you know only**_

_**A heap of broken images,**_

The Angel… or he himself? split the present, a great cleaving scythe of non-matter void, wickedly descending from heaven. It carved through time straight as laser, hewing it wide open, evaporating past and future, leaving only… constant? and gave a glimpse of the beforeafteralways rent and folded round on itself, a snake eating its own tail. The repetitions spiraling inwards, humanity imploding again and again, giving way ever to an identical universe and identical entropy. The chain extended in both directions, a strangely entwined double-helix, but beyond his digestion or comprehension because—and suddenly the certainty was upon him—the head of the snake, consuming its tail so voraciously, was always dictated by the misdeeds and shortcomings of Shinji Ikari.

Shinji Ikari, curled in fetal solitude, on infinite regress like some pink twisted seashell's spiral.

The pathetic being, suddenly stripped of physical artifice, laid bare the sniveling wretch it believed itself to be, blatant in every detail, worthless in every iota. He was the sum of humanity's self-cruelty and gasping self-pity, always seeking to claw its way from the pit of annihilation only to throw itself in again. How ironic the reigns of continuum were held in check by his frail, uncertain hand, a self which could not even love itself! The cosmic joke of an unknowable God.

He—it—they watched this repetition of destructionbirth, each collapse and renewal further energy added to the pyre within his mind, curling and compressing, as the seashell, with such incredible tidal pressure that the singularity shrinking and writhing, smaller and smaller, tighter and tighter, had no choice but—burstfalter_collapse_.

* * *

Shinji Ikari awoke to the dullard safety at the precipice of consciousness, nude save for pallid wrappings of the hospital bed, twisted into a tapestry of fever dreams and nightmares, primal fears which stalked him still from a lonesome childhood. Cold, sterile sunlight embraced his left, and, through the transparency, tainted the room's ashen opacity on a knife's edge of the faintest azure. Cicadas wept in summer humidity, their droning wail muted to careful murmurs from behind the insulated safety of the hospital. Out of sight, the electronic toot of machine voices, steady as a metronome's hand. Beep, wait, beep, wait, beep. 

He would live yet.

An exhausted exhalation whispered between parched lips cruelly violated by plastic tubing, forcing his breath in and out. His eyes tracing unfamiliar grain on the empty plane of the ceiling. The suck and hiss of the resperator barely present behind the Cicada chorus. Fingertips pressed feeble and clenching, digging into reality for the reassurance of the cotton still holding tentative, like his grip on the dawn. The strange notion of comfort and certainty in the repetition of these actions, the uniformity of them, and the sense that all this… had been done before and… would come again, in time.

Then the slow, building fear. Presence. Other. At his bedside. No. Closer. Just… beyond reach, but definite. The slow rhythm of someone else's breathing, tracing its own counter-rhythm to the Cicadas' certainty and his own device's wheezing. Turning in and out of his steady repetitions, a slow eclipse of their mingled sounds. Stop.

Counted the sounds. Measured. In. Out. In. Just to be sure they were real, no further deception from a groggy imagination or the limping senses of post-sleep idling. A painful trembling, fearing his acknowledgement might disturb the unseen menace, rouse it to waking or action or violence.

Carefully now, like the child in the wolf's den, turning towards the noise. His neck, reluctant glacial ice, shifting with ancient strength. The temperfoam of the pillow depressing, frustrating dam against his desire to see the monster.

She.

Eyes closed, lips barely apart. Breath tickling his nose, smelling unfamiliar in its closeness. Safety in that smell, the sudden recall of mother's touch at the scent. Their lips were just fractions apart, nearly brushing against one another if not for the tubing as obstacle. Sudden desire flooding him and embarrassment and shame at the intimacy. Tousled red hair dowsed over an impossible expression of tenderness and vulnerability.

His eyes traced her outline under snowy peaks and valleys of bed sheets. She was curled and close, purposefully so. It was no accident he could pluck the obstruction taped in his throat, pucker, and steal a slumbering kiss like the one he'd imagined on the floor of the apartment _a world away_.

Turned on her side, one long pale and willowy arm snuck beyond the cover's lip, draped carefully over her swollen center.

Damage! … No.

Pregnancy.

Pregnant.

Child.

The glimmer of an almost-smile in her slumber, moaning to him from dreamscape, words thick with sleep:

"Shi…n…ji"

* * *

"I think, perhaps, you don't understand the seriousness of your predicament Ikari-kun." 

The cuffs ached. Cold steel, like that of his bench, invisibly burning wounds into his wrists as if white-hot to the touch. They were catching and chafing with every motion. He thought he could feel sores developing. Or maybe that was just his imagination.

Alone and in the dark again, this time the cool cellar of the NERV underground complex, bound at the wrists _and_ feet, drugged but sleep deprived, _wretchedly thirsty_, and edging on delirious, Shinji couldn't imagine how he could possibly _not_ sense the seriousness of his predicament. It had been serious from as far back as his memory would willingly take him.

"Shinji? Have you stopped listening again?" Akagi's voice was nearly gentle, even through crackling distance imposed by the intercom.

"No, ma'am."

"And you understand? Understand what I'm telling you?"

Why was he wearing the restraints, he wondered. It wasn't as if he could escape. He certainly wasn't strong enough to break down the door. He wasn't even sure he remembered which way he entered. How long had he been down here anyway?

"Yes, ma'am."

"And you _do_ want to cooperate, don't you?"

Hours? Days? Seconds… or years? Time was fleeting, eluding him. He'd felt that once before, hadn't he? Somewhere. Somewhere else, somewhere dark like this…

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then I need you to tell me about the Angel."

"Okay."

"I need you to tell me about what happened to you Shinji. What you remember."

"But… I don't remember anything…" He'd explained this to her before.

Gzzzz. His mouth made that noise. At first, like always, he thought there was some buzzer in the room. Like on a game show when you give the wrong answer and—buzzzzzz you're out! But it was always his mouth making the noise, as the electricity coursed into his abdomen. Every muscle went taught and his tongue curled and coiled. Shapes in the darkness his imagination had long been playing with erupted in newfound euphoria, sketched in new color and energy and vibrancy, quivering with the convulsions. Beautiful new shapes to match the new agony inside him.

"Duh-on't d-do th-a-a-t," he gurgled when the juice cut out, hot tears coursing down his face. He was thankful for the darkness then. Thankful no one could see him cry. Or the urine soaking his pants. What a dirty uniform, he couldn't be wearing that to school, he'd have to get it washed before—

"We _need you_ to explain what happened. Shinji. You were inside it for more than sixteen hours. _Something happened_. Start from the last thing you can remember and _work forward_."

He tried. Tried so hard to think but his mind wouldn't make the memories come.

"I don't, I don't," he paused, expecting the shocks again.

_**I will show you fear in a handful of dust.**_

"Filter," he wheezed

"_What_ filter?" the speaker crooned, enticing him.

He shivered. Saw it again. Crumbling ephemeral flakes, hovering and twinkling in his vision, the last signs that the LCL filter was slowing down, giving up, like everyone else already had. The Entry Plug failures had been slow and cascading, after his shutdown of all the non-essential systems. For a while, the unit had sustained him as its priority, but the power began to slip away. The fear. The need to get out. Pounding at the hatch. Claustrophobia.

"The LCL filter. It was failing. I could see…" Craning his neck, squinting into his past, trying to envision it again. "Dust. Or. Something. I think the oxygen was starting to run out."

"Describe the nature of the particulates."

"I don't know…"

Gzz. He yipped, a puppy kicked by the unseen foot of his master.

Desperately, trying to escape any further pain. "Like flakey! Small. No bigger than a fingernail."

"And after that…" she led him on.

"Cold. I was very, very cold. I curled up, I think. Trying to stay warm."

"And then?" She sounded so expectant, so ready to listen.

They'd reached this juncture a thousand times before from a thousand different ways. The ending was always the same. The questions always led to nowhere, then the pain, disciplining him, punishing his inadequacies. Then a new beginning, from somewhere else, another location he'd started at a thousand times. Ritsuko always sounded so disappointed in him. It was familiar in a way, these conversations and their looping motion. The strange notion of comfort and certainty in the repetition of these actions, the uniformity of them, and the sense that all this… had been done before and… would come again, in time.

"And then." He sighed. "And then I wake up. The rest is… gone."

Silence on the intercom. Would the pain come now? There was little other than the whir of ventilation somewhere high above his downcast head. It was a very lonely place without Ritsuko, he realized. Haunted by its industrious sterility, conditioned to the antithesis of human comforts and the overriding sense one was caught in the core of a machine much larger than one's self—that the safest course was to not impede it, lest one wind up under the claws and pincers tumbling forward, ever forward, in its absurd bureaucratic/animalistic drive.

In a way, it was like what little he could remember of his time spent in the Angel. Lonesome, alienating, fearful, Ritsuko's voice always looming out of the darkness like someone in the shadows, flitting away before he could locate her. Is that why they put him here? To remind him of the Angel? Or was it just coincidence? His father must have known, must be keeping him here, for one of his obscure reasons. Keeping him locked up, and asking the same stupid scripted questions over and over.

"Shinji… why don't you tell me about the hospital? You said you woke up there, right?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Describe it to me. What do you remember?"

"Asuka," he blurted before he could contain himself. He regretted the honesty, though still knowing the conversation would have led there eventually.

"What about her?"

"She was there. She was… pregnant." The word sounded unreal when connected to her.

Asuka pregnant? How long had he been out of it? From the shape of her belly, she could have been into the second trimester. That meant months, months inside the Angel. No way. He'd be long dead by now. Maybe he was. Maybe this was hell?

"You sound surprised, Shinji."

"Yes. I mean, I was. Surprised."

A calculated pause.

"Surprised because..?" Leading him again.

He couldn't resist asking any longer. "I mean, when did it happen? I couldn't have been in the Angel for more than a day. Was I… was I in a coma? Is that when she got…" Embarrassment killed off his trail of thought before he could go any farther.

"I'm sorry? What?" Ritsuko sounded mystified.

"Eh?" Thinking she needed further elaboration. "When she… you know… with, uh, I mean, someone, right?"

"I have to confirm something with the commander," she rattled off hurriedly. "Hold on."

The line fell dead with awkward swiftness. The static hiss of the intercom fled the room and Shinji was left contemplating her disappearance, itchy palms clasped. The smell of his pee was beginning to bother him. Seething anger at this mistreatment hummed to him, daring him to indulge. How could they do this to him? He had defeated the Angel—wasn't that enough? But now, to treat him like some… _spy_. It was if NERV had gone haywire in his absence. His father could be petty and cruel, when the situation or timing demanded, but not needlessly so. This interrogation seemed out of place.

_Something must have gone really bad with the operation_, he thought. Maybe the Angel hadn't been destroyed after all? And what then? We're they holding him responsible?

Shinji might have believed he'd been captured. If not for the reassuring patience in Ritsuko's voice and the familiar utilitarian texture of NERV architecture beneath his hands. The hospital had been real. _This_ was real. They were keeping him here, because he wasn't safe, Ritsuko said. _From what_, he wondered. _Who's after me?_

The tired weight of exhaustion blanketed him smoothly, slowing down the growing anxieties. It was heavy with the texture of thick wool. He had an overwhelming urge to lie down and…

The intercom interrupted, faintly drawing into the cell again.

"Nevermind. It's not important."

What had she been doing? Something about Asuka and… The memory fled, swallowed up into the endless conversation and questions, all muddled together now, the same darkness, Ritsuko's tired voice carrying on. And on.

"Let's go back to the Entry Plug."

"Um, okay."

"I'm going to try saying some phrases and words, and I want you to tell me what you think of first when I say them, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Just say anything at all," she continued as if unsure of him.

"Right."

"Sea of Dirac."

"Uh… water."

"Good. Shrödinger's Cat."

Shinji giggled despite himself and drool escaped his lower lip, disappearing into his shirt before he had noticed. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Math. And really hard physics."

"Negative energy quantum vacuum."

"Einstein."

"Leliel."

_** I could not**_

_**Speak, and my eyes failed,**_

"_**I WAS NEITHER**_

_**LIVING NOR DEAD, AND I KNEW NOTHING,"**_

"What did you just say?" the intercom gasped.

"_Hmm, these seem a bit superfluous don't they?"_ Was that his voice? It sounded so _calm_ and _certain_. He thought he was speaking. Or someone had been. Somewhere.

The cuffs clattered as they hit the floor, metal on metal thrumming through the confines of the chamber.

"Shinji?"

Someone stripped him in the dark.

Naked, he approached the entrance. He glanced at the faint red glow, emitting its access denial message at him. Red turned green in some Christmas parody, and the message changed as the lock released itself. The door shot into the ceiling with the hiss of pneumatic action.

"_Goodbye."_

"Wait! Shinji, the consequences of you leaving that room—"

The door closed on her threats with another compression of air and the crank of magnetic locks inside it.

* * *

Coma. The word had haunted her for a long time. The things they did to him, no _she_ did to him, the situations she put him in. It was a crude sort of insanity—sending children to fight inconceivable monsters. How could they have done such a thing, dreamed once unconscionable by the Geneva conventions, the very same international law NERV had been permitted to operate outside of. They weren't really child mercenaries if their egos were doing half of the fighting, and if those… _things_ were doing the other half, right? Good enough, for the lawyers at least. 

She'd lived in loopholes since she'd taken this ridiculous job. Saving the world had never looked so dirty, so _ugly_ at the beginning.

_Shame on us. Doomed from the start. May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts._

Naiveté wasn't an excuse. She knew every time she'd put him in that cockpit might be the last. They were all, though Asuka would cringe at the wording, just little dolls. Useful things for Gendo's schemes, old men's ambitions, country's desires, self-preservation, and a list of selfish perversions that would go on for as long as she dared to think about it.

Shinji Ikari, pronounced brain dead on recovery. A shadow eighty-nine kilometers in diameter had stolen his soul. She'd put in him inside it.

Asuka absolutely believed he would wake up some day. How mystifying was that? It was almost like a repetition of the behavior she used with her delusional mother, time-warped forwards to a catatonic, unresponsive Shinji. Though her synch scores dwindled further which each passing day, hope, of all places, bloomed in that girl's heart. God was a cruel, clever little man if he existed.

But now it was just her and the Johnny Walker Black. All day, all night. She didn't go to work. She didn't go anywhere. Except further and further into the bottle.

Conversations with Asuka had been a blur and the need to censor herself had long gone away. The girl didn't try and intrude on her coping methods, so Misato didn't intrude on hers. Fair trade.

Was she fired yet? She didn't know. It didn't matter. The drink sloshed onto the table as she poured another glass full.

Where had Kaji gotten to? He'd been just as stirred up as NERV when the Angel fluttered away, pranced into another dimension or whatever theory Ritsu was cooking now. Bullshit, she thought personally. Shinji defeated it, she had screamed as the circle shrunk. Until it shrunk to nothing. And he was still gone.

Then Unit 04 had disappeared during the activation test along with the Second Branch. One of their remote observation posts had gotten the blip of the AT field, the same as they'd seen right before Shinji… left.

She'd thanked God when they found him, curled up on the park bench downtown, naked, just two hours later. God gave her the doll back, but all broken up inside. Shinji, if he'd ever lived, was long gone now.

_Shame on us. For all we have done._

The bell rang. She swung round at the door. It wasn't supposed to do that.

"Who," she muttered. The door slid open—

—and there—

—he was.

"You!" Misato shrieked, actually taking flight as the door pulled back.

He got a quick loot at her face. She'd been crying recently. A lot. He realized, watching her clumsily get to her feet, he'd never seen her drunk before.

"Um, hi. Misato."

She galloped straight into him, almost knocked him over before the hands had reached around and hugged him, muffling any further greeting in her breasts and covering it with her own furious sobbing. She closed the door on their embrace.

He waited, trying to ignore the stench of liquor wafting into his scalp. He wanted to let the moment sit, maybe forever, but he was running out of time. They would be coming. He had to tell her. Before it was too late.

"Misato, they…" He almost didn't believe it himself. "They tortured me."

The hands loosened their grip on him. The syllable came clipped and compressed. "Who?" He could hear violence behind it.

"NERV." He wouldn't dare name the true perpetrator, probably Ritsuko on the orders of his father. "NERV tortured me, Misato, for the last fifty-seven hours. Electric shock, and drugs too, I think. I know actually, I, I have the logs."

She pulled him to the kitchen table firmly by one hand, making no response. Shinji decided he'd better let that settle before he went on. She put him into a seat opposite her, plopped down and hastily shuffled the half-empty bottle out of view. He felt himself shrink under the emerging stare, vigilant, angry, and a little scary.

"How can that be true?" she asked, finally composing herself.

He pushed a crumpled sheet of forms across to her, the pages which detailed the agonies of his ordeal as proscribed by no one—there were no signed orders for things like this he suspected. The fig leaf letterhead visible at the top, photocopy black. She smoothed it out on the table.

He watched it register. The expression sunk and sunk as her gray eyes coasted down the page. Stapled to it was Section Two's orders page regarding him. Shinji watched the transformation, butterfly of vengeance out of caterpillar of mourning—saw the look Misato would sometimes get, facing an Angel that looked impenetrable, impossible to defeat. She had this way of quirking her brow when in deep shit like the kind he'd put her in once he'd walked through the front door. She was hunkering down. Preparing.

"How did you get this?" she asked, still caught in the details of Section Two's lengthy extermination clauses. The euphemisms had been tough to pick through. He'd only skimmed it in the elevator.

"I don't remember," he admitted. His hands tightened around each other, taming imaginary pythons.

She looked up and waited for him to fall into eye contact.

"You _don't remember_?" she parroted when he matched her gaze.

"I've been having these… spells. Where time just sort of, I guess, sort of goes away."

Now the gray eyes crumbled from their dead set tenacity to worry, doubt.

"It's like I'm still there," he continued, looking away uncomfortably from the concern in her face. "But I'm not there too. You know?"

"Shinji. You're scaring me," she said without affect.

"I'm in trouble, Misato," he managed before his voice went ragged with his own dread, and came to a stop lest he break down right there at the table.

_How did everything get so fucked up? How did I fuck this up? I'm sorry, Misato._

"Bad trouble," he whispered.

She reached out and put a cautious hand over both of his—they were nearly white-knuckling each other. He felt his grip slack under her touch.

"Shinji, they have no reason to follow through on these orders do they? Other than this?" she asked, indicating the paper for a moment. She had the sort of look that she'd seen, perhaps even been given such orders before.

"I broke out of the interrogation—"

"What?" Her eyes widened. "How?"

"I don't know. I don't." He sighed. "Remember."

"But you're sure?"

"Yes."

She swallowed. Sat back. She looked away from him, out of the window and into ravaged Tokyo-3, sun high and out of view on the zenith of noon.

"We'll get you out of the country, out of Japan. Far away from NERV. Kaji, he knows how to—"

"You will do no such thing, Major Katsuragi, and I will very kindly pretend I did not just hear that."

She had kicked away from the table. Shinji could see her hand on the hip holster as they turned at the voice. Fuyutsuki stood in the doorway, squinting at them evenly. His hands were held at his back.

"Now, if you would both come with me, I have some men with guns down the hall who I've convinced on my word that you two would make no fuss."

Shinji made to get up, stopped, and resumed his seat when he saw no such motion from her.

"What assurance do we have you won't try and kill him?" she said so flatly it startled Shinji. She still hadn't removed her hand from the holster.

"None."

She gritted her teeth, unclipped the holster's strap.

"Don't." He laughed, patronizing her. "You're stone drunk. I can smell the booze from here."

The pistol was suddenly leveled at him. Fuyutsuki took a step back. He raised his palms.

"Oh, I'm a _mean_ drunk, Kouzo," she drawled, grinning broadly. "Didn't Kaji ever tell you? I'm an even meaner shot."

"Misato," he started, nervous smile setting in. "You fire that weapon, Section Two will rush this apartment killing you _and_ the boy."

Misato shrugged as this, chewing on her lips, considering the outcome.

"You don't leave me a lot of options, sir. I walk out with you, he might die, I blow you away and at least I get one of the fuckers who ordered the interrogation."

"I—"

"Oh yes." Her laughter sounded like teeth skittering over a dentist's floor. "I know all about your little Q&A session. How? Because I've got the GODDAMN ORDERS right here!" She slammed the table with her free hand.

"Keep your voice down," he hissed. "Or they will think there's trouble. Now." He straightened his collar sharply. "You're hardly in the position to be questioning _us_, Katsuragi. But if you must know, I find Shinji's death highly unlikely given that the commander wants Unit 01 back and _he_," Fuyustsuki motioned at the boy, "appears to be the only one that knows where it went."

Suddenly they were both looking at him.

"Now let's get moving before Section Two gets nervous and sees you with the gun at my head."

* * *

The Sephirot looms threatening and immense, black veins curling and twisting like an impossible nerve system carved into the marble ceiling. _How do I even know what that is?_

Kaji was there, tie loose as ever, looking startled and uneasy. Looking tired. He gave a weary glance at Misato who returned it with stony silence.

Fuyutsuki and the unshaven man retreated wordlessly, leaving them staring back at the tinted lenses of the commander, perched and motionless behind the imposing desk. Shinji realized the effect of the nearly non-existent décor was to intimidate any who would dare place themselves in front of it. The distance one needed to cross just to reach the man was absurd. Gendo's throne room, that's what this place was, even if the chair was not the gold emblazoned altar kings had placed themselves on once, the psychosis behind it was identical.

"Your presence is not required here."

The order was presumably addressed at Misato but she made no sign of recognizing it. His stare, though Shinji was not sure how he could tell, seemed to harden even though the distance and stillness betrayed nothing.

"I'm not leaving him alone with you," her answer boomed back after waiting him out, tone matching his.

One hand rose to stroke at the beard as if considering this reply before returning into the other.

"Very well. Shinji, you know why you have been called here, do you not?"

His throat closed. Like every conversation he'd ever had with his father. The anger, rage at the man he'd kept in check for that man began to struggle to the surface, threatening to reveal itself. Shinji hated him, and hated himself for the longing he felt towards that man at the same time. _Praise me_, one part of him cried. And the other muttered vicious nothings to itself. The strange notion of comfort and certainty in the repetition of these actions, the uniformity of them, and the sense that all this… had been done before and… would come again, in time.

He felt both of them staring, waiting on his reply.

"Yes, father."

"Then you will tell me the location of Unit 01."

Something else, crawling through subconscious mud, released itself from shackles Shinji had never known were there and exposed itself brazenly, reptile sunning itself on the lagoon's bank. It sneered at his father, a mouthful of sadistic, vengeful teeth.

"You've been listening to my torture for the past two days, don't you think I would have told you where it was by now if I knew?" Shinji's jaw went numb as the last few syllables finished. He had never, _never_ openly defied his father. He felt as shocked as the stunned face of Misato nestled in the corner of his eye.

"Ristuko's information was unsatisfactory." Shinji saw Misato grasp for the gun that had been stripped of her, tensing suddenly. She knew now. Whatever she would to her ex-friend would be up to her. "I instructed them to bring you to me so as to confirm her conclusions personally. You have no answer then?"

A presence swept over him, the whisper of a premonition that his reply hinged incredible motion, angled it with spectacular precision to a future beyond sight. The sense that his hand now hovered over some gargantuan wheel, a million fates of others spinning forever, embedded in the chiseled granite of its surface, chasing one another round and round, until his touch placated them. Like grasping a Buddhist prayer wheel. And his wrist was falling upon it, unable to stay in flight; it was drifting closer and closer to the surface, the unenviable surface that would bring an end, a final rotation. Something other, not Eva nor Angel, had set these events into motion but now the mysterious mediator had vanished leaving the finality of choice, of destiny, entirely to him. The wheel, spinning prayers up to Heaven would find an end from his delicate palm, though where he had no idea. How it would arrive there, he supposed, was what had been left up to his discretion.

"I have no answer."

The man behind the desk tipped his head vaguely, though in acknowledgement Shinji could not say. He lifted a phone from the desk.

"Yes, it's as you suspected."

"Yes. It is the only course available to us now."

"You may inform Dr. Akagi."

He set the phone down.

_** And any action**_

"Major Katsuragi, you will update the operational procedures with Unit 02 assuming the primary position, and Unit 00 in back-up. Unit 03's profile will be updated for an activation test with Pilot Ikari."

_**Is a step to the block,**_

"Who will pilot Unit 02?" Misato rasped, a note of fear mingling with the dry voice.

_** to the fire,**_

"Asuka will."

_** down the sea's throat**_

"No—she can't!" She flung her fists down with the force of the words. "Her child, her _baby_…"

_**Or to an illegible stone:**_

"It has been decided. The pregnancy is being terminated as we speak."

_** and that is where we start.**_

Misato rushed blindly before a little dart embedded itself in her back and fell her to her knees. Her gasp echoed off the heavy stone work, full and hard as Section Two cuffed her and dragged her away.

What was so important? Shinji couldn't remember. What had his father said? The words would not come. He felt the stone smudge under his stroke, the first few symbols beginning to wipe away into the obliteration of his grip. The reverberation of prayer beginning to be cut short, as the words faded away at his touch, runny ink smearing to incomprehensible possibilities.

The Sephirot and its incredible branches bloated as his head drooped back. His breath, slowed to a stop as time crumbled. Hush in the stillness swamped over the sounds of Misato's departure. The two agents, held frozen in mid-stride, posed ridiculous over the feeble woman. His heartbeat's thump stretched longer and deeper until he could hear nothing more than gaping emptiness.

With the rest of the world at falter, the Sephirot's shape began to unfurl to something greater than its two-dimensional symbols. He'd seen it in the sky before, he realized. White, iridescent and—_burning_.

The Hebrew and pathways, lei lines for something much larger… Like a tree unfolding now, expanding. Always new branches but always leafless, dead. _Always dead._ Like the dendrites of some massive brain, growing in chaotic fractal intensity. There was no room any more, no Gendo, no Misato, only the carvings filling his vision, stretching away, gnarling into all directions, blooming night. The darkness of the stonework deepened its shading to a black for which he had no words because he'd never seen such a color before.

Eyes like angelfire blinked open from the center of the trunk, and stared through him burning away his lies like the flames that threatened to burst from their sockets. The edges were feathered, tapered in a pattern he'd once known so closely. Who?

A hand reached out of marbled shadow and beyondshadow, superluminal in its haste, and steel fingers groped for him, blind but stumbling closer. It was his own hand he realized, finally reaching the end of the wheel, ready to smudge him from existence. Its violet edges brushed his legs then recoiled. The palm opened for him to reveal an eye piercing the center like stigmata, iris crimson. It reached for him, cradled his fragility in the nook between thumb and finger. It was the massive grip of Evangelion Test-type Unit 01. The hand tightened.

His breath left him under the iron accelerating pressure. Muscles mashed softly, squirts of burst arteries. His bones, squealing and grinding before a series of snaps at their failure. His head had come off and—

He was pointing at his father.

"_The unfaithful will convert, the sextant shall be purged, til God is in his Heaven, and all's Right with the World," _he murmured; his hand, index finger extended in the shape of a gun, banged soundlessly.

Gendo's rock-like face was twisted strangely a moment. Scared, Shinji realized.

The child's world tumbled down into unconsciousness. Back to where the dark things lived and grew.

* * *

He remembered slipping. Like a nightmare where you wake up falling. Without the wake up part. Slipping, down, deeper, into the maw of it. Enemy. Then— 

—the strange notion of comfort and certainty in the repetition of these actions, the uniformity of them, and the sense that all this… had been done before and… would come again…

In _Time._

The heartbeat was like a war drum, a Buddhist gong resonating into a distanceless chamber, echoing in eternity. Th-thump.

"Who's there?"

Th-thump.

"Mother?"

Th-thump.

"God?"

A choir of agony and ecstasy over a million Cicadas' screeches, the sound of roaring, approaching ocean, and the primal howl of something much, _much_ vaster than he.

"_**Welcome."**_

"Are you God?"

"_**I am…"**_

Groaning inhalation. A typhoon's squall winds, the grumble of volcanoes' jaws, the sighs of unsatisfied Greek orgies and Bacchic revelries as great lungs filled and sucked in the nothingness.

"_**The idea."**_

_Fin_

* * *

This didn't take me nearly as long to write as to revise and I worked particularly hard on the language and pacing. This may seem incomprehensible but it should be resolved by the next two parts. If it goes longer than that, please don't get angry. Just consider it a nifty feature! I hope you guys appreciated it. Obviously this will raise more questions than answers but I've been thinking about writing this fic for a long time so trust me when I say "it will all make sense by the end."_  
_


	2. The Fire Sermon

**A/N:** I wrote most of this in Europe and some of it in America on wacky jetlag. It might be a little insane. Inside you may find: Jungian theory, Shakespeare, TS Eliot again, and a little Thom Yorke, along with plenty of other things I probably forgot along the way.**  
**

* * *

**2. The Fire Sermon**

Shinji Ikari awoke to a dullard safety. Cold, sterile sunlight embraced his left. Cicadas wept in summer humidity. Out of sight, the electronic toot of machine voices, steady as a metronome's hand.

Beep, wait, beep, wait, beep.

Curled to his right was the smiling, pleasant face of one pregnant Asuka Langley Souryu.

Wrong.

Sitting to his right was the cold, impassive face of Rei Ayanmi.

"The psychological rule," she began, "says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."

Shinji blinked three times. "What?"

"The psychological rule—"

"—does it mean, Ayanami. Meaning."

Rei cocked her head to the side in the delightfully naïve way she had always favored, tilted just slightly down and to the left.

"Meaning," she repeated like a foreign word.

Shinji stared at her thin pale stomach underneath the school uniform. It made him feel anxious. A thought came, snagging a straight razor just under his father's dark beard. Arterial red gush, squirting. Blood and venom. He shivered in the warmth of cotton sheets.

"It is Carl Jung's concept of the shadow, the primeval force of the unconsciousness in the conscious world," she explained. Shinji tried and failed to conjure how that could be the meaning either.

"Why?" he managed.

"The _shadow_," she repeated, smile cresting a moon sliver of white teeth.

Shinji had a non sequitur of consciousness as he imagined a black spot _exactly_ eighty-nine kilometers in diameter blotting out a remote stretch of desert in Nevada. How he knew its exact diameter was mystery. Why it struck him at Rei's unnerving smile was equally unknowable.

Rei's belly looked so taught, so emaciated behind the school uniform. He stared.

"_Something bad happened, Rei_," notShinji said in Shinji's voice.

"Yes."

"Someone was _hurt_. Because of me." Shinji said in Shinji's voice.

"This concerns you." Like all Rei questions it bore no question mark, no inflection at the end, because Rei knew by its very asking.

"What happened?"

Rei closed her eyes. Her far away expression zoomed superluminal, lightyears into constellations with no names.

"Unit 01 has vanished. You will pilot Unit 02."

Shinji propped himself up, put his head in his hands.

"I don't want to," he whined.

"Then we will all die," she resolved.

Shinji picked his head back up at this. Watched her passive face look out beyond the windows.

"An Angel," she said. "An Angel is always coming."

Her eyes were so harmless and beautiful. He knew in that moment she wouldn't ever force him to do anything. He wanted to cry, seeing that gentleness, that openness, and wondering if it would ever come from anyone else—if there was anyone in the entire world without demands to be placed on him, uses and schemes, manipulations, _orders_. Father was nothing like her. He knew that now. And he wondered if that's why they could coexist so easily, if she was the only one that could bear the man's Machiavellian cunning and ambition. Or the only one that could bear his own deadweight existence, having to be dragged every step of the way.

_**He who was living is now dead **_

_**We who were living are now dying **_

_**With a little patience**_

"I'm going to die," he whispered just to her. She did not seem to hear it.

He hoped it would be a grand, climactic thing. _Spectacle_. It seemed like the right way to die. Blood and venom. Sound and Fury.

* * *

She brought the 9 millimeter barrel up and perched it on Dr. Akagi's eyebrow, causing the woman to make a sudden jerk at cold Czechoslovak steel and imminent afterlife nestled behind gunpowder and index finger.

"Check_mate_," someone whispered in the fake blonde's ear. It was a satisfied voice.

Ritsuko let three breaths come and go in the ensuing silence and the hum of her equipment coupled with their breathing, three breaths that disturbed the stillness in the long recycled air of her favorite laboratory. Akagi, an atheist by scientific principle, and by irony given that she tinkered with the inner workings of Gods and the human soul, felt her lips tremble as she tried to find words to speak against an imminent, permanent trauma that, by her beliefs, would leave her rotting in hours and hardly missed.

"Mi-sa-a-to," came the shaking syllables.

The assailant, still invisible to her in the dim twilight of extinguished fluorescents and the twinkle of LEDs, if correctly identified did not make any motion or acknowledgement to her. Akagi tried not to imagine the tautness of the trigger, storing the kinetic energy which would paint her neurons into the latest results and ruinous shortcomings of the Dummy Plug system—that her death and the subsequent collapse of this project would render humanity's last hope an inert hunk of biomechanical elegance did not escape her brief, morbid amusement. And those knowledgeable enough to have infiltrated the Dummy Plug lab without being turned to tenderized meat by Section Two could surely not be ignorant of this quandary, this minor detail in the plotting of the assassination, which meant either that Ritsuko was dealing with petty, selfish revenge at the expense of mankind or psychotic, suicidal indulgence. She hoped it would be the former.

"You can't do this. You know what killing me means. What happens to Project-E if I die…"

"I do?" The voice mocked at her false calm.

"The end of the world," she tried as undramatically as she could manage. "Everything and everyone you've ever known wiped away in one instant." The gun's stillness against her did not waver. "Your father's death—"

Ritsuko screamed as she fell out of the chair, couldn't help herself, as the pistol erupted through her sentence. Screamed and kept screaming for some time until her brain suggested that if she were still screaming, she might still be alive. As she considered this, her screech hissed to a finish and her lungs refilled themselves. Adrenaline pumping away, she dabbed at one temple to find it (mercifully) not covered in the remains of her cerebellum.

"There's valuable equipment in here," she warned as her breath returned.

"No, fuck _you_, Akagi."

The steel toe of a military boot met her sternum.

"I've read about your fucking autopilot, I know all about Rei now." She gave a snort. "Don't worry, I've taken care of the others, just like I'm sure you would have. Eventually."

"No," Ritsuko gasped from the floor, palming for wherever her glasses had landed. She tasted blood.

"Oh, but _yes_, you stupid, stupid bitch. I know what she _is_ and I know _who_ is responsible; and _they_ will get their comeuppance, just like you will… soon enough."

Ritsuko felt tears running down her face as she crawled aimlessly on the linoleum. Shame that she would disappoint _Him_ again.

"Your whole existence is now truly… irrelevant. Because the Dummy Plug won't work outside of Unit 01, and Unit 01, as you and I both know, is now and truly gone. Forever."

"You're wrong," she coughed, hating the fear in her voice. "We were updating the project simultaneously on Unit 00 and Unit 02. There's still…" Still a chance.

"Wrong!" The voice laughed at her gaily. "God, Akagi, you're so blind. Working on those systems all those years—shit your entire career! And you never once saw it… Up till now I figured you were just pretending not to know but _God_, you're even more pathetic than I imagined.

"Unit 01 is the only system capable of interface with the Dummy. There _is_ no Dummy Plug project without Unit 01, get it? It _is_ the project. Because Unit 01—and now I truly see what his fucking obsession with it is, the sick fuck—Unit 01 is _dif-fer-ent,_ Akagi. U-ni-que. _Special_. And you… well, without it, what are you exactly?" She giggled. "A lame fuck perhaps, but really no more valuable than any of the other rats in his fucking cage. You're old news, Akagi. Defunct. _Expendable_."

Ritsuko curled up, bringing the wrists of the lab coat up to wipe at her face, beginning to laugh.

"Liar," she whispered frantically into smears of mascara. "There's no way. You could know that. No way." Her laughter crawled into a nameless grave somewhere and turned to whimpers. If Misato was right… her entire life's work, everything she'd ever theorized on, gone, worthless. Not even a legacy, a _failure_. Gendou would have no more use for her. Maybe that frightened her most of all; thoughts of losing him.

"Yes, convenient for you I suppose, imagining the tactical genius drinking herself to death in the comfort of her own apartment… but seriously? Come on now, Akagi. The girl who aced all the JSDF officer's exams on a hangover and two hours of sleep? The girl who wrote the first draft of the Tokyo-3 construction, ordinance, and subsurface defense layout at _twenty-two_? You think I just dozed into a bottle of expensive liquor and _wallowed_? Some fucking genius you are…"

The combat boots paced somewhere in the hazy dark, beyond her reach.

"No, I did some checking up while you and everyone else were running around like chickens with your heads cut off. Did some digging. And you'd never guess what a little innuendo plus a brand new laptop and an overzealous, caffeine-addicted high school hacker can get you with some prodding and cleavage. Sure it was hard at the beginning, but when you have Operational Level Clearance into most of the major systems it doesn't take long to figure out where all the little ones and zeroes go. As long as I steered clear of anything MAGI-critical you all had your heads so far up your asses over Seas of Dirac and other horseshit I could walk right in and whaddaya know, _the emperor has no fucking clothes on, Akagi!_"

The butt of the pistol came down with a crack on the back of her neck. Ritsuko felt herself flatten. Her ears rang with a dull, empty throb. The voice came to her as sounds of her own weeping returned

"No, the reality is, you're washed up, Akagi. If I hadn't been so busy unraveling Project-E, hell, I might have even caught you burning his brain cells out, one by one. But I let despair get the better of me, I admit. And yes, I regret my moment of weakness. Score one for you, doc. I despaired because I knew the whole thing was bent without Unit 01 and Shinji, they're the keystone—I realize that now. And one, without the other, is just as worthless as having neither.

"So, yes, Ritsu-chan, we _are_ all going to die, because you've ruined Asuka and you've got no more spare Reis. Shinji won't work with the others because He Cannot Synch With Other Units. Period. Even if _he_ was too delusional to realize it, I figured _you_ would have known… if you'd just bothered to take the time to investigate what Fuyutsuki was doing with fuckface back in their post-doctoral heyday, but hey, don't feel too bad! Shit happens… like you, for instance. As for me, once I take him to bed and show him just a little of the kindness and warmth that this world should have given him, then yeah, I'm okay with apocalypse. Just as long as I get to see some fuckers go first."

The muzzle pressed into her right eye this time.

And Ritsuko, being out of options, told the only truth she had yet to give.

"Shinji is the final Angel."

* * *

"Yes, sir," she replied, but another part of Maya thought, _what's the point?_

It made almost less sense than the odd results themselves. Not that she was one to question direct orders from the commander. But even with Shinji's profile uploaded the systems had been testing baseline zero. Nothing. Almost like he wasn't even inside the Plug. And that was never supposed to happen. _Ever_. Even if sempai herself had crawled into the damn thing and gone through the start-up routine, there would be have been something, some blip, some zero-point-zero-howevermanytimes but, a _number_ somewhere at the end of that chain, some signal that a human being was there even if the synch was too low to begin the minimal activation phase. But this…

Something, somewhere inside Unit 02 and 00 must have been, in her technical view, _totally screwed up_.

Sending him to Unit 03 with the coding that out of whack? Well, what was the point, really? Because the whole pilot profile had to be fundamentally broken to read that way. And it didn't matter how many Evas you had, things that broken wouldn't turn around and fix themselves. The Evas were like Murphy's Law to some impossible _n_th-degree: anything that can go wrong will go even more wrong than you ever imagined.

Sure, they had Rei and Asuka on the way now, already well into changing the profiles back for the original pilots. But that, if her guesses proved correct, wouldn't give them any clues they hadn't already picked out. Rei would score her nominal middle ground score she had managed since the beginning. Asuka would score even better, despite her miscarriage, heavy sedation, and the depression that had kept her silent and barely conscious through the last test. And then there would be Shinji's numbers, looking just as strange and unbelievable as they'd been before.

Maya exchanged a weary glance with Hyuga. There had been a few already that afternoon. The whole mood of the place, really, had taken an air of gloom recently. First the Angel's strange disappearing act with Unit 01. Then the ominous reports from the Unit 04 activation test which had put everyone on edge. Asuka's tragic complications with the baby had hit them all like the exclamation point on a few days full of bad and worse news. But Shinji had returned from what seemed to be certain death, and like the sun coming out from behind its cloud, for a while things had appeared to be getting back to normal. Now, like some shadow of the past few days, the synch tests were going… oddly.

She and Hyuga were thinking the same thing. They all were, down the most minor staff. And everyone, though no one wanted to admit it aloud, were all wondering about the exact same answer too: if what had happened to the last Angel had anything to do with it.

Maya didn't pretend to know enough about "Human-Angel Contact" to do anything like diagnose Shinji, yet at the same time, a part of her, the superstitious part that would sometimes invoke the unspoken names of long-forgotten deities upon watching sempai totally wail on the MAGI like a concert pianist going into some fugue-state consciousness—_that part_ wondered, pondered if it was Shinji, not the Evas, that had broken somehow. That he would be unable to pilot again no matter how many man-hours spent bug hunting in the core systems.

There was, for the barest of moments, a starling stab of pity in her side as she watched the boy, slumped in his seat for the train ride across the Geofront to the newly-built testing facility. Watching the brown bangs swivel to the bump of the tracks, hiding that stark expression which frequented the teenager's face too often, his SDAT singing in his ears of concertos and renaissance-era genius.

Though she knew little of what had happened to him after his odd disappearance and sudden return, watching him in the Plug she thought she'd seen something lost, something missing in those tired blue eyes. Something about the confused way he responded to their instructions, kept having to have orders repeated to him and the most simple of actions explained in painfully slow detail. Even when he'd entered Unit 02, his pulse had been a steady slow bmp and he had to be reminded several times what he was doing and where he was.

Yes, come to think of it, there had been something vaguely… disturbing in Shinji's awareness, or lack thereof. He was certainly more absent than normal. Ritsuko had rattled off hastily about "temporary amnesia" before disappearing to attend to something mission-critical but… but she was not supposed to talk about this, or even think about it.

It must have been, she concluded, that there was something sad about watching Shinji Ikari like this, no longer the invincible savant-pilot she had once imagined, but rather some vulnerable, childlike thing, as capable of being damaged as every other boy that age. It was easy, pinning your hopes and dreams on these children as they tended to do; to forget that they were still confused kids stumbling through their adolescence, not the bold glimpses of maturity and adulthood you could spot when the pressure was on and they were all at their finest.

She shrugged the pang of guilt away as quickly as she could rationalize. Maya knew how to fix machines, after all. She had no clue, and had never really had one, when it came to fixing people.

* * *

A black silky sheen, angular and menacing, the armored plates of their latest arrival, eyes burning ahead in its dumb, sulking stare, a mouth wretchedly upturned at its ends into a sort of self-satisfied grimace.

Shinji had long grown used to the shock of seeing the other monsters, and their brutal caricatures of humanity, warped and twisted by some serendipitous engineer. But this one… it reeked of newness and some of the primal fear that seeing that face blink out of darkness had once conjured. For a moment, he had trouble placing Unit 01's hollow eyes in the stare of that memory and not some other, _worse _thing lurking beneath the shadow. He shivered.

The whole thing seemed to be this shade of unreadable black, as if looking into one of those massive plates too closely would have you falling through it, like sailors staring at moonlight on the open ocean. There was something about an Eva's armor, he thought, as the crane began dutifully lowering his cockpit, something that gave you some glimpse into its nature. Rei's monolithic Cyclops, as unblinking and unreadable as her own disturbing gift for perception. Asuka's crimson face, carved and sloped like the casque of some medieval crusader. And his own, lost unit, with its samurai's helm and second, real face he'd glimpsed only once, the hint of the warrior beneath the artifice. Was he that warrior? What was his armor?

* * *

Maya watched on the monitor as the miniscule Shinji looked up at the black visage of Unit 03, filling most of the screen. Then the head did something _impossible_—swung from its upright posture and turned, just barely, to look right at him, eyes aglow. Maya's mouth formed the names of the unspoken gods, her hands frozen over the keyboard.

Her screen, all the screens, turned to the snowy fuzz of static. Someone started to yell before the alarms cut them off.

* * *

The armor of Unit 03 betrayed only malevolence and mystery as he studied it.

_Armor_, Shinji thought, _to protect us from Angels, or to protect us from itself?_

The head turned and tilted to look down on him. The crane, the equipment trucks, the casual jokes and banter, the scurry of preparation, all the motion within the room, had stopped. Faces of NERV personnel stared up at the behemoth's bemused expression, as if they'd seen God for the first time. Perhaps they had.

"**That is the right question, child."**

Its voice sounded like the croak and snarl you might imagine for the sea serpents they drew on ancient maps. It was friendly, like a serial killer's promise.

The deafening noise of restrains and masonry shattered knocked Shinji to the ground.

* * *

"Explain," she commanded.

"The tests… I destroyed them, used an old set. I have the only copy." She groped somewhere inside her coat's inside pocket. Withdrew the clear plastic vile. "In this, you'll find everything you need to know. His DNA is a 98.7 match to ours, almost human but not quite. If you sequence the incongruities you'll find partial matches to the core sample from the Fourth Angel. I didn't have time to run the skin sample through the matter spectrometer, but I suspect the results will be more than enough proof. Waveform matter with similarities to full-spectrum light."

Ritsuko waited for the gunshot to fill her ears.

"Gendou doesn't know?"

A breath of not quite relief filled her. Acceptance, instead. That there was nothing else she could do. For either of them.

"He suspects, but I gave him no evidence to doubt. He only has an unusual sequence of mysteries but no solid proof. It won't matter too much. As long as he believes he can make Shinji fight, he will let him live."

"I…" the voice hesitated a breath, searching, "suppose I should thank you…"

Ritsuko felt the tears drying on her face, her voice suddenly emptied of all its cynical might and replaced with cold, hard fear.

"It doesn't matter now anyways." She struggled not to let her voice shake, letting hope drain from her. "Gendou's gone mad and brought an Angel into the Geofront. Unit 03 isn't an Evangelion anymore. Maybe it never was."

"What…" The harshness of her voice had seared away in the reply. Misato would know fear as well.

Something like thunder rumbled in a basso voice. A coffee cup shattered as it danced from its spot on the work desk. Ceiling tiles shook dust from themselves, sprinkling and hissing to the floor.

"He's insane, Misato. Fighting Angels with Angels. Time is running out for us. He just moves the hands upon the clock. You have to stop him…"

* * *

The emergency siren keened in and out to the sounds of panic. Hardwired alarms, rigged to trip at a wave-pattern: blue AT Field detected inside the Geofront had gone off, putting NERV into late-stage, catastrophic evacuations. But as employees scrambled to their designated shelters, they emerged to find a black Evangelion, slowly trudging towards Central Dogma, one precarious, heavy footfall at a time.

The internal defense switches, all erupting simultaneously, peppered it with a constant barrage of artillery, all of which seemed to bounce and slide away at the last moment, careening still un-detonated into the scattering crowds of evacuees.

Ryouji Kaji, perhaps in some homage to his devil-may-care attitude, ignored the sickening thunder of explosions and screams that howled around him, ignored the flames growing in the forest, and the sounds of desperate, panicked people.

He squatted, rubbing at the surface of one his delicate melons, wiping a smudge of ash that had landed in the garden. Over the tree line, the Angel made its hesitant, childish steps forward. He tilted the water can forward, sprinkling his little darling, and chewing his lip about which to water next; he doubted the faucet would work come his next refill. Of course, by then, he might not even exist anymore.

Something like a shadow fell over him, and Kaji had half a mind to turn around, except that it fell over the entire garden. Fell over the _entire__everything_. The sounds of screams and fear had gone muted. The artillery had stopped, reduced to echoes, there was something like a breeze or maybe breathing, massive, gentle breathing tickling him and where was that humming coming from, so beautiful my goodness she must have thevoiceofanangellll

When it spoke it might have said something like:

**To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,**

**Creeps in this petty pace from day to day**

**To the last syllable of recorded time,**

**And all our yesterdays have lighted fools**

**The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!**

**Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player**

**That struts and frets his hour upon the stage**

**And then is heard no more: it is a tale**

**Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,**

**Signifying nothing.**

* * *

Of course he'd heard their banter, the nervous whispers in the hall, cut short or tempered by his approach yet looming like the long shadow's unfurled on afternoon sun. Walking to the testing area, with thoughts filled of some burden he could not recall.

_I shouldn't be doing this_, some part of him complained.

"Section Chief, and I think he's full of it. Something's gone haywire in the second unit and nobody wants"

_This isn't right, it's her Unit. And I shouldn't be doing this._

"spooked easily but the things they said about the US Branch, I mean my God what if we're all"

_Where's. Isn't right. Her Unit._

"totally lost it. She's been committed now in psyche"

_Something bad happened, Rei. Shouldn't be. Happened._

"says Standard Operating Procedure. Like we've ever"

_Where's. I know it's changed but I can't remember what. Happened._

"wouldn't really worry except everyone around me is on edge. People keep saying we only have one"

_On the bed next to me. Can't remember._

"running out of pilots"

_Where's. Remember. Something bad happened, Rei. But I can't._

"N2s in the air twenty-four-seven now, just waiting for the next big"

_Asuka! Something. Bad. Can't. Where's. Happened._

He wanted to scream. Scream at all of them until they couldn't whisper anymore, couldn't think anymore.

_Where'sAsukawhere'sasukawhere'sasukawhere'sasuka._

"some sort of medical problem. Drugged up to the eyes if you know what I"

and he was crying. Short, dirty sobs. Angry sobs. Because he had no idea why they filled him up.

Consciousness pressed down on him, reluctant glacial ice. Pressed deeper, so light leapt at him through its groaning crevices and tidal pressures. Ice was just, slow, slow water, after all, curling to the might of the moon like everything else. _A bloodstained moon, _he thought before blinding angelfire swept it away. Light, blue and sparkling, through photocopy black darkness.

He was buried. And the groans were not the creaking of ice under sunlight, but the moans of people, uncountable voices, crying out, for anything: help, answers, terror, rescue. He was buried. And the pressure, it was not the weight of consciousness that crushed him but torn cartilage of architecture ripped asunder by the naked purpose of a black God.

It had trampled them all, Unit 03, the Angel, whichever, trampled them all with wanton clumsy steps, strolling through the equipment with the snapping of braces and the gnashing of titanium, pushing through their anthill with singular direction, drunk on its own momentum, and bound straight as laser towards Central Dogma, towards whatever it was all Angels clawed and reached for. Only this one, it simply walked, one lumbering, titan toddler step at a time, and swept them all into its wake with the debris and the fire.

"I don't want to die."

He heard the sounds of his wreckage tomb reshuffle themselves, so the house of cards flattened further with gravity's gentle tug, and the screams of the victims just before the thunderous rearrangement silenced them.

"I don't want to die."

He heard the drum and whooping thump of cannon fire in the distance, placating the receding footsteps of a monster's will but with no avail, never with any avail. Like the march of time and desperate old men, scheming for a reborn world to let them live eternal. Or just a moment longer.

"I don't want to die."

He saw the branches of the Sephirot expanding in a drawn out night, growing taller and broader by seconds, but ever bare, ever empty. Always leafless. Always dead.

"I don't want to die."

Saw Rei's expression, like his mother's, nothing of want in honest eyes, but a trust to let him do whatever he would. That it would be okay anyway.

"I don't want to—" Saw Asuka's dreaming smile, as she called his name from sleep, inches away or in another universe. "The _shadow_," Rei said.

And a spot.

Eighty-nine kilometers in diameter.

Filling beneath the footsteps of his would-be usurper.

Then.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

* * *

He grappled with taffy limbs and grass that crunched like crackers under stubborn legs.

Tripped, flipped onto his back, and the ground puckered beneath him with the tinkle of a thousand broken little things.

It pounced as he struggled up, pushing him back into crumbling mud. Put its hands around his throat and squeezed.

Around him, a thousand million little faces watched, horrified, fascinated, or tried to run away from their thrashing, but they were all _so small_, so _slow_.

It looked him in the eye, and its drool burned into his shoulder, like acid and ice water. Cold sharp pain, filling his arms, but he held strong and stared back into this face, watched its ugly snarling, hungry features, unafraid.

It bit into his arm.

He wrenched it away with the snap of tendons.

It tumbled but righted and crawled, pushed its face into the mountainside. Wrenched open the stone and plunged into the darkness of the cave.

He followed. Behind him a thousand million tiny faces watched him go.

Inside, in their carved out hollows along the cave's walls, tiny faces stared at the beast, hulking before them, ready to tear their hovels to nothing.

But his fist plunged through the wall and into its grinning face. Dragged it away from their frightened eyes.

Pushed it to the wall and pressed its face against the grain. The floor rose like a piston beneath them and he ground the head against the rock, watching it sheer and spark on the rise.

On the surface the tiny faces disappeared, their little monuments stretching like square pillars to the sun.

He punched its face with a cruel fist. Hit and hit again. Till the hand went through the head and met air behind it. It stopped moving.

He ate well.

And imagined all the tiny faces watching. Let them have their spectacle. Their Sound and Fury. He hungered. Let them watch.

* * *

Maya cried out when the hand touched her. Opened her eyes.

Hyuga stared down at her, his soft, sorry face watching her register him there.

She unballed and lifted herself up with the help of his strong arms.

Around her, equally confused colleagues pulled themselves from hiding places, brushed dust off uniforms, wiped tears from eyes.

Misato had arrived at some point. She was panting heavily and her face was flushed from the exertion of getting there. She stared at the gash in the front of the command center behind lavender locks, her eyes much farther away than the hole.

No one spoke.

Maya looked at her console, the last measure of structure before a cliff face which dropped off into a calamity of rubble and unidentifiable mess, the last bastion of civilization it seemed to her now before extraordinary, giant violence. A rampart upon which to look out at chaos.

Across her console, the message scrolled, repeated line by line, infinity bound.

"gendou korosu!!!! gendou korosu!!!! gendou korosu!!!! gendou korosu!!!!"

It was the same on every screen.

Gendou I'll kill you!!!!, it read, over and over.

_fin_

* * *

**A/N: **Radiohead's new album, In Rainbows, could be quite possibly the important thing to touch music since The Beatles._  
_


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